neurophilosophy

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September 18, 2007
Christian Jarrett has posted an excellent collection of resources for students and teachers of A-Level psychology. Christian's post includes links to PDFs of key papers in cognitive, developmental, biological and social psychology, including a classic 1968 paper from American Psychologist, called…
September 17, 2007
I got this email yesterday, and am posting it here on the off chance that a reader might be able to help out. I thought that the article on traumatic brain injury on the front line was most fascinating and I was hoping you might know of speakers in New York who might be able to speak on the…
September 17, 2007
I'm hosting the 16th edition of the genetics carnival Gene Genie on Sunday. If you've written something about genes or genetic diseases on your blog and would like to submit it, you can do so using this submission form.
September 17, 2007
The Wakeda-Docomo Face robot 2 (WD-2), developed by mechanical engineer Atsuo Takanishi and his colleagues of Waseda University in Japan, can make and switch between various facial expressions, all of which are very realistic. The robot consists of an elastic mask whose morphing is controlled by…
September 17, 2007
From Yahoo! News: A Chinese man dropped dead after playing Internet games for three consecutive days, state media said. The man from the southern boomtown of Guangzhou, aged about 30, died on Saturday after being rushed to the hospital from the Internet cafe, local authorities were quoted…
September 17, 2007
This film clip shows Michael Gazzaniga carrying out a behavioural study of a split brain patient named Joe. The split brain procedure (or corpus callosumectomy) involves severing of the corpus callosum, the bundle of approximately 100 million nerve fibres that connect the two hemispheres of the…
September 17, 2007
The Boston Globe has a nice article about the cognitive abilities of birds, by Seed Magazine editor-at-large Jonah Lehrer. There's a remarkable similarity between a passage from Jonah's article and something I wrote about the same subject. On page 2 of his article, Jonah writes: For most of the…
September 17, 2007
This drawing is a 4-year-old boy's depiction of Hurricane Katrina. It is one of 50 drawings, photographs and sculptures that went on display yesterday at the New Orleans Museum of Art, as part of an exhibition called Katrina - Through the Eyes of Children. Involved in the exhibition is Karla…
September 16, 2007
The Inquisitive Mind (In-Mind) is an online quarterly social psychology magazine written by staff and students at the Free University in Amsterdam. The site has articles that cover all areas of social psychology, written in such a way as to make the field easily accessible to the general public.…
September 16, 2007
Katelyn Sack writes: Another blogger has sent me a link to your post "Neurological alphabet fridge magnets" asking for more information about my "Baby, Be A Brain Surgeon!" painted tile series, featured on The Science Creative Quarterly this Tues., Sept. 11. Although perhaps the images of the…
September 15, 2007
This week, I've received three books which I'll be writing about in the near future: My Lobotomy, by Howard Dully and Charles Fleming. Dully was lobotomized at the age of 12 at the behest of his stepmother - that's him on the right, holding an instrument identical to the one he was lobotomized with…
September 15, 2007
but I prefer holding a book in my hands to reading from a computer screen. We already have the technology that will enable us to carry whole libraries in our pockets. Next month, for example, Amazon will launch Kindle, an electronic book reader, and Google will begin charging users for full…
September 14, 2007
From my inbox: Scientific American.com recently launched a brand new podcast called 60-Second Psych, which runs every Thursday for a one-minute commentary on the latest studies in brain and behavior...Though only a couple of episodes old, this podcast is already the #2 ranked podcast on Apple…
September 14, 2007
The New York Times reports that the findings of a study published last week in the American Journal of Psychiatry, which links a drop in the use of specific serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs, e.g. Prozac) to an increase in the numbers of teenage suicide, are being disputed.
September 14, 2007
Recently, I've written a couple of posts about the use of microfluidics-based devices in neurobiology research. First, I wrote about microfluidics chips for imaging neuronal activity and behaviour in the nematode worm, and then about chips for culturing neurons.  Today, Technology Review has…
September 14, 2007
A new survey, released today by the ORB polling agency, suggests that around 1.2 million Iraqi civilians have been killed since the U.S.-led invasion of March 2003. That's more than 4% of the country's population.
September 14, 2007
You can subscribe to my RSS feed by pasting this link into your feed reader. I've added an orange RSS button, as well as a counter displaying how many subscribers I have, in the sidebar on the left. You can also get email notifications of my latest content here. 
September 13, 2007
When Carl Zimmer asked scientists to send him photos of their scientific tattoos, the response was huge, as was the interest in the photos he collected - together, the original post on his blog and the photo set he uploaded to Flickr have been viewed about 200,000 times, and have even been…
September 13, 2007
The word "zombie" usually brings to mind the creatures depicted in numerous horror films - the mindless, rotting "living dead" who shuffle with their arms stretched out in front of them, devouring the flesh of their victims.    Zombies feature widely in popular culture, but the idea of the zombie…
September 13, 2007
Gareth Furber, author of the PsychSplash blog, has just launched a new website called PsychAntenna: ...an ever-growing showcase of psychology-related websites, blogs, podcasts and journals that utilize RSS to broadcast their content, [whose] goal is to help clinicians, researchers and students...…
September 12, 2007
Taking its lead from the (Product) Red AIDS fund-raising campaign, the Alzheimer's Association has chosen purple as its signature colour. To support the initiative, electronics manufacturer SanDisk has co-branded two products. For every purple 2GB Cruzer Micro drive and 2GB SanDisk Ultra II…
September 12, 2007
Go to PsychCentral for the list.
September 12, 2007
On March 4th 1991, four days after the end of the Persian Gulf War, ground troops from the U.S. 37th Engineering Battalion destroyed large caches of weapons found at the Khamisiyah Ammunitions Storage Facility, a site approximately 25 square kilometres in size, located some 350km south east of…
September 12, 2007
This morning, I went with my girlfriend Alice (and our son Oscar) to the Foetal Medicine Unit at St. Thomas's Hospital, where she had the first ultrasound scan of her second pregnancy. Alice has just entered the second trimester of the pregnancy, and the foetus you see above is just 6 cm in…
September 12, 2007
Researchers working in West Africa have observed male chimpanzees taking great risks in order to obtain cultivated fruit, which they then exchange with females, who often became more willing to mate as a consequence. Kimberly Hockings, of the University of Stirling in Scotland, and her colleagues…
September 11, 2007
A is for Amygdala B is for Brainstem C is for Cerebellum D is for Diencephalon E is for Epithalamus F is for Frontal lobe G is for Gray matter H is for Hypothalamus I is for Interbrain J is for Joints of Luschka K is for Kolliker's reticulum L is for Lateral sulcus M is for Medulla…
September 11, 2007
Reed Elsevier is experimenting with open access. The publishing giant has just launched a web portal called OncologySTAT. The service is aimed at physicians, who will be required to register their personal information at the site in order to gain immediate and free access to research papers from…
September 10, 2007
From Visions of the Daughters of Albion, a short illuminated text published in 1793: With what sense does the tame pigeon measure the vast expanse? With what sense does the bee form cells? Tell me what is a thought? & of what substance is it made? Tell me what is a joy? & in what…
September 10, 2007
(Image credit: William Ormerod/ Unversity of Wisconsin-Madison) A recent study into the biophysical properties of a highly reflective and self-organizing squid protein called reflectin will inform researchers about the process of "bottom-up" synthesis of nanoscale structures and could lead to the…
September 10, 2007
Dr. Deb Serani has just posted the 31st edition of Encephalon. The next edition will be hosted by GrrlScientist at Living the Scientific Life on September 24th. If you'd like to contribute, send your links to encephalon{dot} host{at}gmail{dot}com, or use this submission form.   Encephalon needs…